User:ErgoSum88/Rant

It seems the successful Featured Article nomination of Interstate 70 in Utah has opened up a can of worms we weren't prepared to deal with. The FA administrators have said Interstate 70 in Utah needs a bolded title so it can look like every other article on Wikipedia. According to guidelines "The article's subject should be mentioned at the earliest natural point in the prose in the first sentence, and should appear in boldface." But wait... it also says "If the topic of an article has no commonly accepted name, and the title is simply descriptive [...] the title does not need to appear verbatim in the main text; if it does happen to appear, it should not be boldface."

This is the extent of our dilemma. WTF are we going to do? One side says "Duhhh! Clearly the title should appear in bold!", the other side says, "Are you fucking retarded? This title is obviously descriptive!" That pretty much sums up the discussion over at WikiProject U.S. Roads. Personally, I think it's obvious that the title is descriptive as anything with the words "in" or "of" in the title is clearly describing something. An article named "Plumbers" is clearly an article about plumbers. An article named "Plumbers in Utah" is clearly not an article which describes the typical plumber.... hence it is descriptive. People in Utah don't call it "I-70 in Utah" they call it "I-70".

Leave it up to Wikipedia editors to nitpick over something so lame. If we spent half as much time arguing over what to name things, how to arrange articles, and other irrelevant details we might actually accomplish something. I understand the need for consistency and the desire to establish standards, but this is ridiculous. Its this kind of crap that makes you feel ashamed to be an organism capable of communication.

In all seriousness, I just wish we could agree on something. Or even agree to disagree and just compose articles based on whoever feels like doing whatever at whenever.... cuz this shit is laaaame!

Yet another reason I (almost) refuse to get involved with controversial topics. It's simply not worth my time or energy to sit here and argue with people over what should or should not be included in Criticism of Christianity or Incest. Those articles are like a black hole of effort and information... constantly edited and nitpicked to death and sometimes to the point of being unreadable! As soon as "consensus" is reached about something, a few months pass and a fresh batch of do-gooders are ready to fuck the whole thing up all over again. Its damn near impossible to keep watch over these articles without sacrificing your life and your sanity in the process.

I recently discovered a video game article (RapeLay), which is about a game where the point is to rape a mother and her two daughters. Granted, not something everyone wants to play. But certain people seem to think a game about rape is worse than any of the thousands of other violent games which depict murder (think Grand Theft Auto). Not to belittle rape, but I fail to see how fucking someone against their will is worse than outright murder. Personally, I wouldn't participate in either of the two... but video games are fantasy, which is why so many of us accept violence in movies and games. But our puritanical American values tell us a goddamn boob is a thousand times worse than, lets say... sawing a person in half with a chainsaw. Yeah, ok. They're both just as bad... but if you accept one you should accept the other. Plenty of men and women have fantasies about being raped, but I highly doubt anyone fantasizes about being murdered.

But anyway, Wikipedia is not censored and I smelled a rat. The RapeLay page was practically empty, save for a short description and one lonely mention of the game's controversial nature. Cited, by the way, from a news article about games which depict rape. The most outrageous part was, this article was skeptical that games depicting rape even existed! There was no mention of this particular game, yet the statement was "Games such as this have been cited as reasons to control video game content." But I digress, the page was lacking. I checked the talk page and edit history... and sure enough, there it was. One person felt this game didn't deserve an article, and proceeded to take the article hostage, removing all the information from the page claiming it to be ORIGINAL RESEARCH!

To make a long story short, I thought something wasn't right. Its a freaking game, all you have to do is play the game and see that it is indeed, a game about rape. Why would you need someone else to confirm it? Turns out, Wikipedia policy states plot elements about works of fiction don't need citations! Which is obvious when you think about it. As long as you aren't making any sort of original interpretations regarding the plot, the work itself serves as the source.

Therefore, I want to thank you, unnamed do-gooder. You have made me realize an obvious fact which will now come in handy. So now every time someone cries out OR! OR! when they see "trivia" about tv shows and movies, I can reply with BULLSHIT! BULLSHIT!

It has been decreed that Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information, yet in the same breath they say that Wikipedia is not a paper encyclopedia. They talk and talk about how highbrow this place is supposed to be, and how important our work is, and how this is a legitimate encyclopedia. Well guess what? Its not.

Legitimate encyclopedias do not have articles about Britney Spears, Tila Tequila, Bart Simpson, Toplessness, Cleveland steamer, Donkey punch, Stupidity, or any of the thousands of other retarded topics we cover here. Yeah, I've heard it a million times, "Why don't you read WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS? Just because there is other crap out there doesn't mean we should keep this crap."

My question is, what the fuck is the harm in it? If someone wants to spend half his life designing articles about every single last Pokemon on the face of the Earth, then why rain on his parade? Most of these articles are not even deleted, just redirected into a bigger article... with the argument being "Well its taking up too much space, we don't need this crap." Meanwhile, the page isn't really gone, if you look up the page history its all still right there... you've just redirected it to another page and left out all the "cruft" that you felt was unnecessary. You haven't actually reduced anything, and in reality you've actually added more crap to the system than you removed. By the time these merges and deletions are discussed, archived, reverted, discussed again, archived again, ad infinitum you end up with bloated page histories of articles that were once 20kb in size which are now just a simple redirect to the parent article with two sentences about the subject.

By the time its all said and done, you haven't actually saved anything. All you've done is wasted the time of the person who created the fancruft, wasted your own time for worrying about such "trivial" things, and wasted server space by arguing about it.

What I don't get, is if this stuff is so trivial, then how the fuck do they find this shit? Do they spend all day looking for stuff to delete? If Pokemon are so goddamned non-notable then why the fuck do so many people spend their time making these articles? If we don't need articles about every TV show episode, then why are people looking at this stuff?

Obviously, people come here precisely because this is not a normal encyclopedia. People come here to look up instances of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in popular culture. People want to see articles about every single episode of their favorite show... if they didn't want to see them, they wouldn't make them.

I understand information must be verifiable, notable, reliable, blah blah ad nauseum. But people don't come here to read boring, rehashed dusty old pages taken from the Encyclopædia Britannica... they come here to read the "cruft" that most of you seem so hell-bent on getting rid of.

By no means am I advocating the inclusion of inaccurate or unnecessary material. I understand that a lot of bullshit is added to articles that doesn't need to be there, and if someone didn't keep it in check some articles would be so large as to be unreadable (see United States). What I see going on here, is a lot of people who get their rocks off by pissing all over other people's snowmen (speaking of snowmen, that article seems ripe for deletion). I see people who take pleasure in deleting information they don't agree with, find offensive, or simply don't know enough about.

I realize there are other wikis out there, dedicated specifically to this cruft Wikipedia tries so desperately to eliminate. Wikipedia tries to act like they're better than those other wikis, because we have standards, procedures, bureaucracy blah blah ad verecundiam. It is precisely this kind of snobbery and elitism that makes me want to give up on this place.